Macbeth: A Brief History Of Sleepwalking

Someone wakes you up in the middle of the night and asks you what are you doing?! You wake up confused and ask yourself the same thing. The person who woke you up is describing you doing some odd activity that you were not consciously aware of. If something like this has happened to you or someone you know, then you or that person was probably sleepwalking. As someone who used to experience sleepwalking first-hand, it can be a little scary at first but it is a natural sleep disorder. Sleepwalking has been occurring for hundreds of years. Even Shakespeare alludes to it in his famous play Macbeth. For many years this phenomena was unexplainable, but now with new technology it can be solved. Sleepwalking has a broad history with diagnosing, has a variety of different causes, and has effects to all ages at different consistencies.
Sleepwalking has been around ever since man went to sleep. It has pretty much been around since man was created. But without some scientific proof on it, it just seemed like a mysterious scene created by the gods or whatever man believed in during the time period. In ancient times it could have been believed that the person was possessed or under the influence of some godly figure. There was never a widely believed explanation for sleepwalking. Psychiatrists usually considered sleepwalking to be part of a “hysteric conversion” or a dissociative disorder, and on the biological side, neurologists insisted that it was an “epileptic” problem (Szelenberger, 2005, p. …show more content…
The science behind sleepwalking has come a long way since the beginning. New advancements in technology has allowed a scientific explanation to a once phenomena for the ancient times. We now know the diagnosing, the causes, and who and how it affects individuals. The next time someone is caught in the action of sleepwalking, do not panic because it is just a natural, known disorder that occurs quite often among our